In this post: Why page speed matters, and a case for site speed optimization. Random factoids. Why you’ll never see us dancing in the streets.

What if you could make one change that improved every aspect of your digital marketing? It would benefit:

Conversion rates

Bounce rate

Time on site

Search rankings (a little)

Performance across every digital marketing channel

You’d do a happy dance. We would, too, but an office full of pale, dancing web nerds is not a pretty sight.

A faster site (meaning faster-loading pages) provides a better user experience. That pumps up performance across every digital marketing channel. Measure anything you want. Faster is better. So, make one change that speeds up page load times on your site and poof, you’re a marketing hero.

Time to start dancing.

Page speed impacts revenue

The better the user experience, the more you sell.

Page speed impacts the very core of the user experience. Want proof? Look at how customers respond to faster and slower sites:

According to Kissmetrics, 40% of consumers abandon websites that take more than 3 seconds to load. 47% say they expect a website to load in two seconds or less.

It’s about more than expectations, though. This is about dollars. In 2014 we compared page value–the actual value of a single pageview on a website–to page load time. Guess what we saw? Faster pages make more money. A lot more money. You can increase dollars per pageview by 20% reducing page load time from eight to five seconds.

But the real win comes when you get your page loads to one second or less. Go from two to one-second load time and dollars per pageview jump 100%. Value doubles.

If you get 10,000 pageviews per day and earn $20,000 per day, your current value per pageview is $2. Reduce your page load time from anything over to two seconds to one second, though, and you’ll double value per pageview to $4.00. You just increased revenue by $40,000! [2]

This isn’t just for business-to-consumer, either. Every organization:

Delivers content to mobile devices, whether they know it or not

Relies on some form of conversions: Leads, calls, votes or sales

No matter what you sell or how, if your website loads fast, you’ll improve revenue and results.

Page speed impacts social media

You know what really improves content sharing and likes? If your visitors actually see the content.

In spite of what pundits want you to think, short attention span isn’t a new thing. A magazine page, printed on paper, loads instantly. There’s no lag time. That’s what we’re all used to. Put content on a screen and we expect the same thing. Every second we have to wait for a web page to load is pure agony.

Our boss once tried a test: He put an image on two pages. One page loaded in two seconds. The other loaded in four. Then, he sent 100 clicks (via Facebook ads) to each page.

Page speed impacts paid media performance

Google makes it pretty clear:

Your landing page loading time If it takes too long for your website to load when someone clicks on your ad, they’re more likely to give up and leave your website. This unwelcome behavior can signal to Google that your landing page experience is poor, which could negatively impact your Ad Rank. That’s why you want to make sure your landing page load time is up to speed. Adwords Support